Priebus's tea party tightrope

Reince Priebus faces many challenges in taking over the Republican National Committee, but among the trickiest will be building support from the anti-establishment tea party without offending big GOP donors or the independent voters the party needs in 2012.

The GOP’s ability to strike that balance could go a long way toward determining the outcome of Election Day 2012. And Priebus’s experience as Republican chairman in Wisconsin shows just how difficult it can be to bring along the fractious tea party – full of feuding groups and relatively new activists who abhor the philosophical compromises often necessary to build broad coalitions.

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While Priebus boasted, during his campaign for RNC chairman, of his good relations with Wisconsin tea party groups, the leaders of those groups give his tenure mixed reviews, with some accusing him of giving only lip service to the movement while stacking the deck against its candidates, shutting them out of the process or working to absorb them into the GOP.

“Priebus will do whatever it takes to co-opt the tea party movement,” said Mike Murphy, chairman of a tea party-allied 527 group called The Republican Liberty Caucus of Wisconsin, founded in late 2009. In the midterm elections, Murphy’s group supported tea party candidates, including some who were undercut by the state GOP, which largely ignored long-shot tea party candidates and endorsed the primary rivals of others at its May convention — months before the primary election.

“He didn’t allow for conservative voices that didn’t jibe with the establishment view and if he charges down that course (at the RNC), the tea party people will wake up and it may very well split up the Republican Party” coalition that powered the GOP’s 2010 landslide, said Murphy.

Interviews with eight other Wisconsin tea party leaders since Priebus’s election Friday as RNC chairman revealed similar misgivings about Priebus’s handling of the party endorsement process, which they saw as emblematic of the clubby establishment politics that the tea party has railed against since the movement burst onto the scene in April 2009 in opposition to what its activists saw as a fiscally reckless agenda being pursued by President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress.

One tea party leader said Priebus’s GOP barred his group from getting a table at the state Republican convention, while another perceived a slight in the party’s choice for a keynote convention speaker: Bush political guru Karl Rove, who emerged as a tea party nemesis after calling the movement “not sophisticated” and dismissing one of its highest profile candidates, Delaware GOP Senate nominee Christine O’Donnell, as unimpressive and unelectable.

Yet Priebus also had supporters in Wisconsin tea party circles.

Some activists credited him with reaching out to the dozens of tea party group in the state, listening to activists’ concerns about the party, trying to coax some into local and county parties and — above all — helping the GOP retake the governor’s office, control of the state Legislature, two congressional seats and a U.S. Senate seat.

“There were some tea party people who felt disenfranchised, but you can’t argue with the result — they won,” said Jake Speed, chairman of the La Crosse Liberty Coalition, who said Priebus deserves credit for brisk fundraising and shrewd resource allocation.

Speed said many of his members became more active in local and state Republican politics during Priebus’s term. “A lot of people like to say that the Republican Party kind of co-opted the tea parties, but I think it was the other way around,” he said.